I’ve talked about the mystery of success a lot on this website. 6 years ago, I made the proclamation that the secret to success was constantly stepping out of your comfort zone. That is true, but — I have now realized it can be distilled into an even more base element: pain tolerance.
Generally speaking, there are three types of pain you can experience: physical, mental, and emotional. Personally I’d combine mental and emotional into one category, but many people smarter and more well-researched than I have made this distinction and so I’m going to trust them on it.
Physical pain is the most obvious. If I touch a hot stove, it hurts. I don’t need to explain this one.
Mental pain is where it gets interesting. A good example of this, that most people have no doubt experienced, is anxiety. That dreadful feeling you get when you’re about to give a presentation? That’s a form of mental pain. Depression and trauma are good examples, too.
Emotional pain is where it gets really interesting. So the way most experts separate mental and emotional pain is that emotional pain is in brief flashes and not tied to overall mental state. In English, some examples include going through a harsh breakup or losing a bunch of money in the stock market — these might be triggers for mental pain like depression, but they are sharper and more tied to a given event. Hence they are emotional pain.
Now I want to give some examples of when pain tolerance helps.
First, athletes. Now obviously if you go too overboard while exercising, you can suffer permanent debilitating injuries. But you’d be surprised to know how large the margin is between “this is starting to hurt a little” to “I need to go to the hospital”. Your body can withstand a lot of pain — most of it is up to you.
Athletes know this very well, which is why the most successful ones know that they can push themselves incredibly hard during an event. The ability to ignore the signs of pain and fatigue in favor of winning a trophy is pain tolerance.
There’s a lot of examples of mental pain, but right now I’m favoring that of a chess player. Chess players — also poker players, broadway performers, musicians, pick your poison — know that they will start to lose if they give into their fear or anxiety about a match. So they have to stay calm and clear-headed. They need to build mental pain tolerance.
For emotional pain, I can talk about an entrepreneur. The early days of building a business are stressful, and you are constantly on the verge of collapse and needing to find a new job. People who can’t deal with that pain are either going to never start (in which case I suppose you can’t call them an entrepreneur) or quit early, make rash decisions, etc. etc. You could say the same thing for trading. Good entrepreneurs, and good traders, can deal with high amounts of emotional pain.
In all three examples — and countless millions more, which I don’t have time to be granular about — all come from pain tolerance. Getting outside your comfort zone is important, true — but the reason you go outside your comfort zone is because you can deal with the pain of that exit. That’s the true secret behind success.
